I inherited a coat from a dead friend recently, a fantastic coat, heavy and reddish, the fabric like tapestry. There are bits of embroidery on the elbows, and a couple of visibly invisible mends around the arm sockets. The almost antique buttons could probably be exchanged at market for a brace of pheasants or a couple of shanks from a broad-bottomed heifer.
My friend occasionally wore the coat with well-polished boots at somebody’s winter wedding, lanolin lotion on her gardener’s hands, or pulled it around her shoulders in a cold church pew when an old neighbour bit the hedgerows. But more often she wore it with wellington boots and grass-stained jeans, or wrapped a shivering dog in it, or slept under it in her muddy hatchback, waiting for markets to open where she would sell her handmade wreaths and bouquets.
I met her when I was a young woman, 19 or so, living far away from home, when, in the absence of an ongoing education or template for world domination, I was blowing the yolk and albumen out of duck eggs. I decorated them and tried to sell them in order to contribute to the rent on the little mock-Georgian house I lived in, in a little learner-marriage with my young boyfriend.
My friend was in her 40s at the time, but seemed somehow ageless. We would spend occasional evenings together in draughty rooms, warmed by whiskies and her withering observations on rural life.
Her own life was unpredictable, at times precarious, and she had known tragedy, yet she was generous and acerbic and funny and adventurous. She never tried to peddle life in a bucket of charm; our conversations were bracing, and it felt good at that tender age to unwrap naivety.
Sudden and implacable
I went to see her the day before she died. Her illness was sudden and implacable. The road from vigour to malady was travelled by the shortest of routes, and came at a time when she was probably happier than she had ever been in her life. She loved her grandchildren, her new, manageable, damp-proofed home and the fresh career she had just embarked on.
Old times
I sat by her bed that day and we had a laugh remembering old times, recalling some of the lighter moments from a scrapbook of shared memories, such as the time she was queuing in a hilltop shop when one of her more officious and protective dogs clambered into the front of the car to see what was taking her so bloody long and inadvertently let the handbrake off. (Try explaining that to the nice cat-loving lady in the insurance company.)
Granted, you would probably need to have been there to appreciate the humour, but we were creased up remembering defrosting a whole salmon in a lukewarm bath, perched on the pale pink lip among the shampoos and soaps, hissing at the dead-eyed fish while the guests were gathering at the door.
When I left her she was watching a box set; the hospice nurse was downstairs. I said I would see her soon. I didn’t.
Anyway, with the summer almost ready to cash in her chips and it being near enough time to bin the exfoliant and send the kids back to school for somebody else to deconstruct, entertain and even educate, I decided to send the coat to the cleaners for a few repairs.
I like this time of year. I like that sense of settling in for the long haul, and it's a relief to stop pretending that you can carry off Day-Glo bikini bottoms. And I have no regrets about packing my bare calves away, so blue-veined and knotted they look more like a topographer's guide to the Andes than anything you have viewed in Bulimia Beautiful.
When I went in to collect the coat, the woman behind the counter asked me to step into the side room, where someone was ironing and where a sewing machine sat idle. Outside the window, the sun beat down.
“Try it on,” she said.
I stood in front of their mirror and slipped into the cool lining. And I saw my friend, not in my own hot face and hair that needs its roots done, but as she was when I first met her, life-bruised and compelling and a little ferocious. Like the coat, she was a magnificent survivor.
I’m looking forward to wearing it, to turning towards soulful winter with a fragment of her past on my back.